Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) refers to the air interface of the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile network standard. The E-UTRA network (E-UTRAN) supports aggregation of communications using LTE spectrum (licensed spectrum) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) spectrum (e.g., unlicensed WiFi spectrum). When operating in aggregation mode, which may be referred to as LTE/WLAN Aggregation (LWA), user devices (UEs) may be configured by the E-UTRA base station to utilize both LTE and WLAN radio resources. The base station supporting LWA may be connected to the WLAN via a backhaul link in either a collocated deployment (e.g., the base station and the WLAN Access Point (AP) are deployed as an integrated unit) or non-collocated scenario.
Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) may be implemented in an LWA environment. With respect to the user plane, PDCP may be used to compress and decompress headers (e.g., Internet Protocol (IP) headers), transfer user data, provide ciphering and deciphering capabilities, and more. With respect to the control plane, PDCP may be used for ciphering and integrity protection capabilities and for transferring control plane data. In a LWA environment, PDCP may enable a UE to provide an evolved Node B (eNB) with PDCP status reports to, for example, indicate which Protocol Data Units (PDUs) (e.g., packets) have been received successfully and which packets have not. As such, the PDCP status reports may enable the eNB to resend PDUs that were not received by the UE and/or intelligently adjust the amount of information (e.g., packets) being communicated to the UE via the eNB and the WLAN AP.